One of the things in nutrition that I believe is so fundamentally overlooked is our foods energetic nature. Food is one of the most intimate activities that we can partake in - literally we are what we eat! The food we consume is the fuel that our body runs on, it is the material and building blocks that we break down and then reassemble to make our physical body. We are our food, and our food is us!No doubt about it!.

We have lost our ability to see the subtle energetics and matrix of food, and largely base our food choices on the way it physically looks. That is, if it is brightly coloured, big, plump and juicy then it must be full of nutrition.

We do not see with our eyesthe toxic pesticide and insecticide residues left behind on our fruit and vegetables. We do not see with our eyes the effects of years of selection for particular traits in plant species at the expense of others. We do not see with our eyes the effects of the direct genetic modification of our food (that is taking genetic material from one species and injecting into another, in the case where nature would never permit naturally for this to occur e.g. genes from a pig into a plant). We do not see with our eyesthe resulting depletion of life force and energy of our food due to our farming practices, cooking methods and food choices. We do not see any of this.

Interestingly though our wild animal friends may still have this innate ability.

ABC online reports that animals at Copenhagen Zoo are going ape over organic bananas and other fruits, rejecting traditional foods left in their cages according to zookeepers.

“For one reason or another, the tapirs and chimpanzees are choosing organically grown bananas over the others. Maybe they are able to instinctively tell the difference and their choice is not at all random. The chimpanzees are able to tell the difference between the organic and the regular fruit. If we give them organic and traditional bananas, they systematically choose the organic bananas, which they eat with the skin on. But they peel the traditional bananas before eating them.

And here is another example that has been going vial on the internet and Facebook lately:

Paul Fonder was curious to see what kind of corn squirrels would favour. Last fall, Fonder conducted an experiment in his South Dakota backyard. He built a squirrel feeder and put genetically modified corn fresh from a neighbor’s field on one post and one-year-old organic corn on the other.

“You would expect squirrels to prefer fresh corn over corn that’s a year old, but that’s not what happened.

— Paul Fonder

Fonder repeated the experiment five times, using different varieties of organic and GM corn. Each time, he got the same results.

Do you think that it’s possible the squirrels might be on to something here? Is there something beyond the limited physical impression that they can detect and understand that we cannot?

According to quantum physics neither ourselves, nor anything on our planet is not made of matter. We are not fixed, physical, material beings, rather the smallest particles of our body are in fact discrete packets of energy. We are energy, our food is energy - so what type of energy and vital life force are you consuming?

All life on earth is surrounded by its own electromagnetic field. And the development of Kirlian Photography can give us photographic evidence of this (David Wolfe's book Eating for Beauty for more on this stunning photography). Kirlian photographs capture the electromagnetic radiation patterns emitted by objects across a wide spectrum of electromagnetic energy. These energy patterns are not visible to the naked human eye.

From the images below we can see the intense, vibrant, electromagnetic and luminescent patterns found in organic foods compared to non-organic foods and raw foods compared to cooked foods:

From Left to Right: OrGanic Grown Orange compared to a commercially grown orange (Kirlian Image)

Left to right: raw broccoli compared to a cooked broccoli

Left to Right: Raw Tomato compared to a slightly cooked tomato

Perhaps our wild animal friends can see the aura of vibrant energy that emanates from foods? Perhaps it is an energetic subtly that we lost at a young age as we became more dense and focused on the physicality of life?

If we are essentially made up of energy at the smallest particulate matter as we know it, then surely the quality and quantity of life force energy of the food that we eat is of paramount importance- not only for the health of our physical body but also the quality of our thoughts, our energy levels and our emotions. What is igniting and fuelling your zest for life? Are you eating for health or disease?